


A Scientific Discovery About Babies (made by Dr. Harrison Wells, PhD)

by Sholio



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Babies, Cuddling & Snuggling, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 01:58:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8602771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Babies are Bob Dylan fans. At least when sung by sleep-deprived parents. For the "cuddling" square on my h/c bingo card.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is kinda-sorta true. I don't know why but singing Dylan songs has utterly mesmerized every child under the age of 1 that I've ever interacted with. "Blowin' in the Wind" is my go-to song for calming down fussy babies. Also, Dylan really was in a motorcycle accident in 1966.
> 
> I don't remember any specific canon for when Earth-2 Tess died. In the conversation in 2x19 in which Harry starts off "When your mother died," Jesse doesn't seem to react as if she remembers her mom very well. So I'm going with Tess having died when Jess was a baby, and the two of them being on their own ever since she can remember.

Harrison wasn't actually expecting it to _work._ It was only that he was at his wits' end. Tess had been ... gone ... for a month now, and Jesse had just turned seven months old. She was both the thing that had kept him from sliding off the deep end after losing the woman he'd expected to spend the rest of his life with, and the thing that was actively pushing him off the deep end because she _just. Wouldn't. Sleep._

He couldn't do this; he didn't even know how to be a parent, let alone a single parent. He was still on bereavement leave from the university, but he was going to have to go back eventually -- either that, or continue with his plans to quit his faculty job and launch STAR Labs, but that one had made infinitely more sense when Tess was alive and he wasn't a single father. Right now, he didn't know how he was going to accomplish either one of those things. Just keeping Jesse and himself alive from day to day seemed to be more than he could manage, at least based on his current state of sleep-deprived zombiehood. He couldn't remember if he'd eaten today. For that matter, he couldn't remember if he'd fed Jesse, although she kept turning her face away every time he tried to push a bottle nipple between her lips. But that didn't necessarily mean she didn't need it; Tess had been breast-feeding her before ... that ... happened, and she still reacted with poisonous hatred to formula unless she was desperately hungry.

He wasn't sure if Jesse was old enough to understand what she'd lost, but there was no doubt in his mind that she knew _something_ was missing. She had always been a happy, easygoing baby in the six blissful, if exhausting, months before his world blew apart. Now she was a screaming, squirming hell-baby, as if the only way she knew to react to the loss she'd suffered was with anger. She was a baby-sized anger-bomb.

Harrison could relate. Unfortunately he could only relate up to a point, because explosive fury plus a month of almost no sleep plus a screaming seven-month-old baby was a combination that could not be allowed to exist. For Jesse's sake, he learned control; for Jesse's sake, he learned to lock himself down.

(He later realized that Jesse might be the reason why he didn't burn the world down in those early, Tess-less months.)

But she just wouldn't _shut up._ He'd tried everything: feeding her, walking her around, going for drives in the car (recommended by a female co-worker with two kids, but he had to stop doing that because he was so sleep-deprived he was afraid he'd get into a wreck). Besides, it didn't help that much anyway. No one's suggestions seemed to do a damn thing. It couldn't be good for Jesse either, screaming all the time, but he had no idea what to do to fix it. He wasn't used to encountering problems that couldn't be reasoned through, but Jesse was a tiny font of such problems. Nothing about her made sense and she didn't seem to respond to anything in a rational way.

It happened in the middle of the night. He was rocking slowly, with a screaming Jesse on his chest, in the chair that Tess had always used for breast feeding. The lights in the room were off, the street lights painting the wall, and he began quietly singing to himself.

He didn't have a good singing voice and he knew it. Tess used to sing. Harrison didn't; he never had, not for most of his life. He didn't like being bad at things, and his off-key rasping baritone was something that he _wasn't_ good at. He'd been desperate enough, with Jesse, to occasionally try lullabies at her, but he didn't remember most of the words and he felt self-conscious anyway, trying to go through the motions of Rock-A-Bye-Baby with Jesse screaming and kicking in his lap. Sometimes it made her pay attention to his face for a few minutes, but then she went back to throwing a fit, like always.

So it was mostly for his own sake that he started quietly singing to himself, calming himself, because he couldn't, _couldn't_ let the anger win, couldn't let himself even risk hurting the tiny, screaming, infuriating, infinitely fragile and precious creature wailing its impressive lungs out while cradled in his arms. He liked Dylan and the Stones and Linda Ronstadt, and he was quietly and probably very badly singing "Blowin' in the Wind" to himself when he noticed something.

She wasn't crying.

Harrison looked down into the wide blue-green eyes, fringed with tear-clumped lashes, that were now staring up at him, and if he hadn't fallen desperately and completely in love with this tiny helpless thing in the first instant that she'd been handed into his arms in the hospital, this would probably have done it all over again. Mostly because she was being quiet.

He started over at the beginning, and sang "Blowin' in the Wind" for her about five times, then switched to "Tambourine Man" and several renditions of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" before he realized that she had fallen asleep in a small tear-sodden lump on his chest, breathing slowly in time with the rise and fall of his chest.

He was afraid to move, afraid of disturbing her. Anyway, he was too tired to even think about moving. All he had to do was close his eyes to sink into insensate, nightmare-free blackness.

Jesse woke him a couple of hours later with tiny, fussy whimpers, but she took her bottle and sucked on it vigorously while watching him intently as he serenaded her with Dylan's greatest hits and a little bit of the Stones and Beatles and an Eagles hit or two for variety.

He wasn't sure how in the hell it worked, but it _did_ work, and for the first time in his life he didn't even give a flying fuck that he still couldn't carry a tune in a bucket: he sang to that kid at every opportunity he got, and he didn't stop doing it until she was two or three years old. He was getting busy with STAR Labs, and Jesse was starting to walk and talk and cheerfully squeal her own versions of songs that had been popular twenty years before she was born, and he'd never really _liked_ singing all that much -- he still didn't like being bad at it -- so it slowly but surely became something he didn't do anymore. Jesse was starting to enjoy being read to, so he switched over to walking her through picture books, while she hung in adoring fascination on every word, even his digressions into explanations of the physics of _Hungry Hungry Hippo._

(Many years later, he was fascinated to find out that the other Earth -- he absolutely was not going to call it Earth-1 -- had its own Bob Dylan, who had written many of the same songs. Their Dylan, however, hadn't died in a motorcycle accident in 1966, which meant this world had a whole slew of Dylan albums he'd never heard. He didn't enjoy any of them as much as the ones he remembered, though.)

**Author's Note:**

> Fic/vid blog at [sholiofic](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/).


End file.
